Get Ahead of the Curve: Annual Planning for Growth Leaders | Growth Elevated

Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:02)
Julian introduces the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast and its focus on tech leadership stories and insights.

About the Host and Community (00:00:27)
Julian shares his background, past guests, and introduces Growth Elevated and its community events.

Guest Introductions and Episode Focus (00:01:14)
Julian introduces Gord Boyce and Keziah Once Stolen, and sets the topic: annual planning using EOS.

Annual Planning Timing: When to Start (00:03:04)
Discussion on when companies typically start annual planning and best practices for timing.

Strategic Planning in EOS (00:04:09)
Gord explains how strategic planning fits into the EOS process and the Vision Traction Organizer.

Aligning Planning with Fiscal Year (00:05:04)
Discussion on aligning annual planning with fiscal years and starting conversations months in advance.

Role of Chief of Staff in Annual Planning (00:06:06)
Keziah explains the chief of staff’s role in facilitating and coordinating the annual planning process.

Who Should Own the Planning Process? (00:08:10)
Debate on whether the integrator, chief of staff, or other leaders should own the planning process.

CEO’s Role vs. Process Owner (00:09:13)
Clarification that the CEO owns the plan, but not the process; execution is delegated.

Frameworks and Approaches to Strategic Planning (00:10:30)
Transition to discussing frameworks, with a focus on EOS methodology and its structure.

EOS Methodology Overview (00:11:09)
Gord details the EOS process: vision, traction, session days, and the eight key questions.

Setting Rocks and Scorecards (00:13:56)
Discussion on the number of rocks (90-day goals) and scorecard metrics for effective execution.

Success Rate for Rocks (00:14:45)
Agreement that aiming for an 80% success rate on rocks is ideal.

Contrasting EOS with Big Enterprise Planning (00:15:29)
Gord shares his experience at Nokia and contrasts it with the simplicity and practicality of EOS.

Chief of Staff’s Role in Communicating the Plan (00:17:53)
Keziah outlines steps for retrospectives, gathering input, and preparing for annual planning sessions.

Retrospective and Planning Steps (00:18:08)
Importance of retrospectives, integrating learnings, and preparing for productive planning sessions.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Planning (00:19:49)
How to synthesize top-down guidance with bottoms-up plans and resolve conflicts in planning.

Communicating the Strategic Plan (00:22:53)
Best practices for sharing the plan with the whole organization and ensuring alignment.

Tailoring Communication to Stakeholders (00:24:16)
Crafting messages for different stakeholder groups and ensuring managers can answer questions.

Ensuring Consistency in Communication (00:25:55)
Chief of staff’s role in managing the rollout and maintaining message consistency.

Execution and Quarterly Planning (00:28:20)
Frameworks for execution, quarterly reviews, and the chief of staff’s role in tracking progress.

Quarterly Rocks and Accountability (00:30:43)
How rocks are set, reviewed, and carried over each quarter; ensuring alignment on priorities.

Chief of Staff’s Playbook for Execution (00:32:10)
Chief of staff’s deliverables: milestone plan, talent plan, budget, and running the rhythm of business.

Weekly and Quarterly Cadence (00:34:20)
The EOS Level 10 meeting structure for weekly leadership team check-ins and issue resolution.

Annual Calendar and Planning Rhythm (00:35:36)
Mapping out the full year’s meetings and key events to ensure effective planning and execution.

Challenges of Strategic Planning in Remote Work (00:36:47)
Discussion on the difficulties of remote work for strategic planning and the importance of in-person sessions.

Change Management and Buy-In (00:38:22)
How to foster buy-in and ownership among managers and teams, especially in remote environments.

Final Advice for Leaders New to Planning (00:39:53)
Encouragement to start simple, plan early, re-forecast quarterly, and keep the process flexible.

Closing and Resources (00:41:24)
Where to find more information, connect with the guests, and access additional resources.

Podcast Outro (00:42:32)
Julian thanks listeners and invites them to subscribe and visit the website for more leadership resources.

Julian Castelli 00:00:02 Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Julian Castelli 00:00:27 Hello, this is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech and growth industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXO of great companies like Work Front, CHG, healthcare, Pathology, Watch and Moment, canopy and the San Francisco 40 Niners. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. We are a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CSOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to make to help all of us become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast as well as our blog and of course, our annual Ski and Tech Summit, where we bring leaders from all over the world to beautiful Park City, Utah to enjoy some great skiing and some collaboration with other tech leaders.

Julian Castelli 00:01:14 So if that sounds interesting to you, please check out our website at elevated.com. We’d love to have you join us for skiing or join us for our community year round. Today I am very excited to be welcoming two of our members to the podcast. Gord Boyce is a seasoned technology executive and for today’s purpose, most importantly, a professional iOS implementer. The entrepreneurial operating system and it is is annual planning season just around the corner. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about. And that’s one of the specialties of the iOS system. Gord is an experienced CEO and executive, where he has led and scaled both SaaS and cybersecurity companies. One of them was for Scout Technologies, where he grew revenue from 6 million to over 100. Gord, we have to have you on this podcast to tell that story someday. I can’t wait to share that with the audience. That’s a good one. And then I’m happy to welcome back Keziah. Once stolen, she is an award winning entrepreneur and a seasoned management consultant based in Denver, Colorado.

Julian Castelli 00:02:09 Keziah had a incredible, incredible career at Accenture, where she was the Chief of Staff and advised global organizations on sales, talent and operational strategies. And while there, she learned what a chief of staff is and realized that a lot of people don’t didn’t know exactly how to utilize the chief of staff or what they were. And we just had a podcast with because I was explaining what a chief of staff is a few weeks ago. So you can check that out on growth Elevator comm. But when we’re speaking about annual planning, Chief of staff is one of those key force multipliers that makes that that process and and that exercise, much more easily doable and more consistently doable. And so we wanted to have Keziah here to talk about the role that a chief of staff has in annual planning. We want Gord to share some of the iOS techniques and secrets, and hopefully this podcast will give you some ideas, this fall for for planning. Planning your 2026 annual planning cycle. So welcome, Gordon. Welcome, Keziah.

Julian Castelli 00:03:04 Thanks for having us. Hey. So what? You know, it’s just September now. We’re recording that the podcast will probably come out in October. But in your experience, when do people start thinking about annual planning? But when does it happen? And when do you think is best practice? Maybe start with you, Keziah.

Keziah 00:03:18 Yeah. So we see that people always start it too late. Like I’m going to start with, one of the challenges around annual planning is that everyone has good intentions about Q4. It always seems to be sort of like something that happens around November, December. Maybe some of the teams that we met are starting in January, right? My my goal is for everyone to start thinking about it in August. Get on the calendars in September. Ideally, the event is in October, the annual planning, because then you have a little bit of time. Of course, there are things that are going to close out throughout the year. You’re going to get an updated kind of end of your result.

Keziah 00:03:49 So there’s a lot of things that will happen between October. But ideally we’re starting in September and October is.

Julian Castelli 00:03:55 To give you some time. Let’s just think about when you said between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my my neck tensed up because I’m thinking. I’m just thinking about how busy things are at that time and trying to get a whole team together and have have some structured work in that period. Gawd, what do you think?

Gord Boyce 00:04:09 I agree, if that’s the that’s when you have the time to do that strategic planning when clients come to iOS. So that’s one of the first things we do. And it’s kind of like when do you plan it? When’s the best time to plant a tree? It’s either today or 20 years ago. And and like.

Julian Castelli 00:04:26 Even better 20 years ago. Right.

Gord Boyce 00:04:27 Yeah. Right. So strategic planning is not the very first thing that we do in the iOS process, but it’s the second and third day that we take to go through what we call vision building day one and Vision Building day two, which is our version of strategic planning, which the our clients end up with a two page document that we call our veto Vision Traction Organizer.

Gord Boyce 00:04:48 It’s the answer to eight simple questions that results in a long term strategic plan, which then you review thoroughly once a year, but at least quarterly. So it’s a living document that just keeps moving with the company as market conditions change.

Julian Castelli 00:05:04 And so you can start that at any time of the year when you when you start working with a client. But then if they have one, when do they kind of renew it for the next year just to put it on a cycle.

Gord Boyce 00:05:13 Usually in their annual planning session. And that tends to be, as I was saying, in the Q4 timeframe or in the Q1 timeframe, it just every company is different, but about half of them do it in Q4. Half of them do it in Q1.

Julian Castelli 00:05:24 Got it.

Keziah 00:05:25 Okay. Noting it’s aligned with your fiscal year planning, whenever that is.

Gord Boyce 00:05:28 Exactly. Yeah.

Keziah 00:05:29 That’s right. I would pull it back 3 to 4 months and start the conversations three more four months prior.

Julian Castelli 00:05:36 Yeah, I would agree. As a multiple times CEO and CFO, you know, the ideal is, is that you have 3 or 4 months to iterate on it.

Julian Castelli 00:05:43 The reality is I’ve had many experiences where we’re trying to jam it in, and that is less than ideal. So we’re trying to talk about the ideal here to give people some guidance for how to how to hit 26. Right. So, because, what’s the role of a chief of staff in this process? you know, maybe, maybe, you know, give us a little intro of the chief of staff role. And then specifically, let’s guide towards how they can help be helpful in strategic planning.

Keziah 00:06:06 Yeah. So for those of you all that don’t haven’t been around a chief of staff, the chief of staff is someone that sits to the right hand of the leader, and they are coordinating the execution of the vision. Right. And that means they’re aligning, executing and amplifying three components, aligning on what the plan is executing on the plan, which is the rhythm of business and special projects that will support you as the leader. And then amplification, which means is the leader in the right place at the right time, is a leadership team in the right place at the right time? Are we optimized in that sense? So knowing what the Chief of staff does, then what I will say about their role in annual planning is kind of I’ll elevate this a little bit in annual planning.

Keziah 00:06:42 Someone has to own the the annual planning process and it cannot be the CEO. I know people try to do it, but if you want to do it properly and use a best practice methodology. Someone else needs to own it and it could be the CFO. It can be the COO. It can be the chief of staff. It doesn’t really matter. You just need someone to own it. It can be the integral integrator and the chief of staff. I know we’re talking about in a minute, but someone needs to own it. If it’s the chief of staff, what they’re going to be doing is the one that is facilitating the annual planning process. And I’ll just give a few examples. Who is involved? Who are the stakeholders in annual planning? One of the things I think that people don’t think about enough with annual planning is that there needs to be a change management element to it, so we understand who’s involved in annual planning. Then we understand that they’ve got the meetings on the right in on their calendar.

Keziah 00:07:28 Who do we want in each meeting? We don’t want everyone in every meeting. So think about that. And the chief of staff is running all of that. That’s a lot of work. And it’s not the CEO should be doing it. And frankly, I think the CFO also should be focusing more on the forecast and the budget and all of the financial metrics versus some of this sort of execution. And then. I mean, I can continue, but that’s really their role is to coordinate the facilitation of annual planning and get to a successful outcome that then is communicated across the right stakeholders.

Julian Castelli 00:07:54 Yep, I think that makes a lot of sense. I’ve been in all those roles, and I’ve had my share of contributing to the annual planning as the CFO, as a CEO and a CEO, and I wish I’d had a chief of staff to help organize that. Gord, what what are your thoughts? Who should be in charge of the annual plan?

Gord Boyce 00:08:10 Well, I kind of agree with Kezia in that we have a different name for the US methodology.

Gord Boyce 00:08:15 It’s called an integrator, and it’s the exact same roles and responsibilities because I just stated it’s this. This is the person that keeps the train running in general beyond annual planning, just running the company, keeping the train schedule on schedule, and staying down in the weeds with the entire company to make sure things are flowing. That’s the natural person to also own the annual planning, and so the CEO can focus on vision and strategy and really get focused on where we want to be as a company in the not too distant future that really had them focus on their strategy at the integrator or the chief of staff focused on the the execution of that strategy, whether that’s creation of the strategy or execution of the strategy itself.

Keziah 00:08:58 Yeah. And, Julian, can I make one nuanced point? Is that, sure, the CEO must own the annual plan, right? It is their job to and we talk about it. And you do top down planning and bottoms up planning. Right. That’s how we think about this.

Keziah 00:09:13 This the process. But the CEO must own the plan. That is their job, right? What is the vision? What are our strategic levers that we’re going to pull next year? Like they need to know and own that it’s the execution of the annual planning process, that process.

Julian Castelli 00:09:28 It’s like, yeah, who owns the planning process? You’re right. Ultimately, if the if the strategic plan or the annual plan represents the company’s strategy, the CEO owns that. I would agree with that. But the process of updating it and maintaining it and reporting on it becomes quite administrative and technical and multifaceted. And that’s where I’ve seen it go. Like as you said, Gord, I’ve seen it go to the COO. I’ve seen it gone. I’ve been the CFO when it’s gone to me. I’ve been involved with SEO. One of your chief of staffs, when they’ve played an integral role. And so I. And you call that the integrator role, the person who kind of does that cross-functional alignment, right?

Gord Boyce 00:10:03 Gawd, we do.

Gord Boyce 00:10:04 And that’s what they would naturally be assigned. If you are sitting in the integrator seat is what we call that, that portion of your org chart, that’s your part of your responsibility to make sure that the strategic plan and the annual plan is, is on track and is being followed.

Julian Castelli 00:10:23 Terrific. All right. Well, let’s get into the process. So we’ve, we’ve covered like hey it’s Q4, we’re two weeks from Q4. So it’s time to get started.

Keziah 00:10:29 Yep. We’re in it.

Julian Castelli 00:10:30 Now if you’re the CEO it’s your responsibility. It’s it’s your core job. However the planning process, you could use some help. And then if you have a chief of staff that would be great. It might be your whoever your integrator is, whoever your cross-functional coordinator. What is it? The GSD. You get stuff done. The person you know is going to be help you on the planning process. So let’s talk. Let’s move now to frameworks and approaches. Like it’s a heavy heavy topic strategic planning.

Julian Castelli 00:10:55 Right. Because everything from highfalutin you know strategy consulting to you know, a financial model on on on the opposite side. EOS has some really good structure here that you’d shared with me earlier. Do you want to walk through the steps of the annual planning process?

Gord Boyce 00:11:09 Sure. So let me just take a quick step back, though, and talk about the overall methodology in the first place. It’s all about giving our company’s vision traction, and healthy vision is just about clarifying what that vision is. So a big part of your strategic plan is that vision, making sure that your leadership team agrees and understands where you’re going and how you plan on getting there. And then traction is just about instilling a level of execution and discipline throughout your organization so that wherever you look in your organization, people that are doing the work understand what that vision is, and the job that they’re doing on that particular day is aligned with that strategic vision, which when you get that vision and traction, it’ll lead to a healthier team, a healthier management team, a more cohesive management team.

Gord Boyce 00:11:54 And that will translate to the rest of the company. The way that we do that is we go through a series of session days when we start with a new client. We focus initially on some tactical stuff, so we start with a focus day where we clarify what your organization is going to look like, where we set up some very clear but short term 90 day goals that we call rocks. We set up a scorecard, which is metric based on how we’re doing on a week to week to week basis, and what we call a meeting calls, which is how you’re going to conduct your meetings once we’re done, their very tactical stuff and their working leadership team is working on those tactical things, we can then shift to strategy. And as I mentioned earlier, we go through two days called Vision Building Day one and Vision Building Day two, where we just answer those eight simple questions on your auto, your vision traction Action organizer. Those eight questions are what are your core values? What is your core focus? What is your ten year target? What is your marketing strategy? And then getting a little bit more tactical? What is your three year plan three year picture excuse me, and your one year plan done simultaneously, all with the ten year target in mind, which will then inform you what your rocks should be.

Gord Boyce 00:13:03 And your rocks is just our word for a 90 day business objective, and none of those rocks will calm a bunch of issues. And once you solve issues and we have a very specific way of solving issues or working through issues, it will create a seven day to do list, right? So after those two vision building days, you’ve got everything from this is where we want to be long term to this is where we should be in three years. This is where we’d like to be in a year. This is where we’d like to be in 90 days. And therefore this is what I should be doing tomorrow. So everything along the way and as your market conditions or whatever shift, you’re constantly looking at that strategy to make sure that it’s still relevant, and to see if it should shift one way or the other. And if you’ve got a crazy idea that seems like it’s a great thing that we should be doing, but it’s not aligned with your vision, it gives you a good reason to say, we’re not even going to talk about that.

Julian Castelli 00:13:56 How many? How many rocks are you allowed to have in your in your basket?

Gord Boyce 00:14:00 A handful. I use the term a handful all the time, so it’s whatever you can.

Julian Castelli 00:14:04 Use the leverage that I gave you some leeway. Right? I’ve heard some people say only three, but.

Gord Boyce 00:14:08 Yeah, so.

Julian Castelli 00:14:09 Handful, depending how big your hands are.

Gord Boyce 00:14:11 So I say handful. It’s the same with your scorecard. How many metrics should I have on my scorecard? it should be between 5 and 15. Almost always. All the time. My clients end up with 23, and the argument is about, okay, we gotta get this 23 down to say, 12. If we can do that, you can manage those numbers. There’s 12 numbers there. You can manage them. If there’s 23, there’s 100,000 other companies that have done this that will say that’s too many.

Julian Castelli 00:14:37 Yeah. I think we can all agree on 23. How many, how many do you think is the right number? Because I.

Julian Castelli 00:14:41 Key. Key objectives or key goals?

Keziah 00:14:43 6 to 10.

Julian Castelli 00:14:45 Six.

Keziah 00:14:45 Ten. I guess the other thing about rocks, I think is always really interesting is that 80% success rate. You should be really aiming for 80%. Is that what you see? Gord?

Gord Boyce 00:14:54 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Keziah 00:14:56 80%.

Gord Boyce 00:14:57 80% of everything.

Keziah 00:14:58 Right.

Julian Castelli 00:14:59 Achieving so however many you choose, how many that you have confidence you can get 80% success rate. Is that is that kind of a metric to iterate on?

Gord Boyce 00:15:06 Exactly. And it’s 80% for everything. I mean you’re never going to get 100%. So that’s not a it’s a.

Julian Castelli 00:15:11 It’s it’s, you know, diminishing returns. Right.

Gord Boyce 00:15:14 Right. Right. Exactly.

Julian Castelli 00:15:15 If you’re at 85, you might you might be better off focusing on the next rock.

Keziah 00:15:18 But also I think it strikes the balance of being ambitious, but, you know, not also just sandbagging all your rocks. So I think it’s a good target.

Julian Castelli 00:15:26 terrific. So so, Gord, I want to I want to talk about a story.

Julian Castelli 00:15:29 I think you were involved with strategic planning at a big enterprise company, which is different than the entrepreneurial, companies that you work with now and that we work with at Growth elevated. You know, we focus on companies in that growth stage between 5 and 50 million. So, you know, what are the benefits of EOS. And the reason I think a lot of our members really like it is it’s bite size. It’s very well structured. It’s not going to take forever. But why don’t you contrast that with how things worked at Nokia? I remember you telling me some stories about the the strategic planning process at Nokia.

Gord Boyce 00:15:57 Yeah. So I was a senior executive at Nokia, a long time ago, 25 years ago when they were, you know, a pretty big company. And I think at the time we had like 56% market share for cell phones in the US.

Julian Castelli 00:16:10 And Nokia was dominant. We were those little those little snicker phones.

Gord Boyce 00:16:14 Right. And I was, I ran, the Americas for, the business unit that sold to enterprise companies.

Gord Boyce 00:16:22 So it was a pretty big job. And I was a VP. And as a result, I was invited to the strategic planning, which took place in Helsinki one time a year, and it was a three day meeting. So a day to get over there, three days of meetings, a day to get home. We had a wonderful slide deck at the end of it, which, when I got back to the office and told all of my employees about it, I really couldn’t see how this was going to translate to their job. It was a beautiful presentation, and I see this a lot. Even with my existing clients. They’ve gone through and done some form of strategic planning and they’ve got, as an example, their core values written on their website or this beautiful presentation on what they hope to do someday. But that’s all it is. It’s just a hopeful thing. Whereas US will take, as I just described, take that vision and turn it down into traction like we have a quarter by Gino Wickman, who invented EOS.

Gord Boyce 00:17:11 And his statement is, you know, vision without traction is nothing more than hallucination. And that’s what a lot of companies do. They create these great visions, but they don’t do anything with them. And that is, in my opinion, a waste of time.

Julian Castelli 00:17:23 Yeah, that that is, most companies don’t have the ability to fly hundreds of executives for, for five days out of the office to do something. So this, you know, today’s day, we need something that’s tight, that’s fast, that’s manageable and easily understood. So let’s let’s assume we’ve we’ve done that process and we have something now we’ve got some some rocks. What’s the role. Because I in the chief of staff now to take that plan and make sure it’s communicated properly. Let’s talk about alignment within the organization. Once you have that initial plan what should you do next.

Keziah 00:17:53 Yeah. And I, I mean I love us by the way. We run on it actually at Bannon. And I think what’s interesting is that one of the things I want to add and Gord, maybe you can talk about it in the US language, but we always recommend, as when chiefs of staff are more running this process, we have six steps.

Keziah 00:18:08 The first one is retro, so do a retro of the past year, because if we’re assuming that we’re doing this in a normal cadence that you have done annual planning before, I always think it’s worth looking back, not dwelling on it, but just looking back in these areas of what did we learn and then integrating that into reviewing the goals. When you pull your veto out or your goals for the next year, what are we going to change if anything? Right. And then there’s usually as you go through those goals, there’s these activities that can be things like researching new go to market. What is researching new markets? There’s all sorts of stuff that we need as input into a planning session that then requires the chief of staff can go do that. They can partner with whoever needs to be doing that. They get that Intel to then inform then a session that you’re going to run to be most productive.

Julian Castelli 00:18:52 And so yeah, I think that’s a great point. The retrospective is a great way to start.

Julian Castelli 00:18:56 Right. What do we what do we learn. Right. It’s like watching film in the team room. So we set out to do XYZ. And how did we do. And then you know how much time you spend on that and how much time to figure out the why is that? Is that the same session because I or is that maybe a different session?

Keziah 00:19:10 I think it that’s I know I think you’re doing that before. This is like ideally you’re starting in September and that’s why these we have six steps right. It’s retro review the goals top down plan bottoms up synthesize them and then communicate. But that you don’t start those six in September. It’s going to take a while and it gives you more time to think about them. And you don’t have to put pressure on it. But that retro can be I always think about it in the ways that where did we pivot away from our 25 plan and then start and like highlight those. Don’t spend a ton of time on it. That’s like a really good way to think about the top 2 or 3 times you had to pivot during the year, and then what happened? Then you go into the you know, you take all of that information, you go into that sort of like big whether you do it as an offsite or you do it virtually.

Keziah 00:19:49 Ideally, you bringing everyone together kind of like to gaurd your point. But but prior to that, you’re doing that research that is required to inform. And then what I’ll say is like the the top down plan that’s important. So as a chief of staff we’re gathering the retro. And you can do this in two different ways. You can bring the whole team together and do a retro, or you can have your chief of staff go function by function team, depending on what the team structure is. Grab their retros, summarize it all up. So there’s two different options for all of this right. And then we go into okay we need some top down guidance. And that usually comes in the form of hey our year over year growth has been X. What do we at the highest level. And then you’re working with the CFO. And then I always like to bring in the functional leads for the bottoms up and the top down planning. And the bottoms up planning comes together in that off site and that off site where you’re the chief of staff.

Keziah 00:20:36 If they’re if you have a good chief of staff, they’re doing all that work with you, right. They’re gathering the top down information. They’re bringing the bottoms up plan that they’ve worked and coached with the leads on coming up to like let’s say it’s in November, right. And they’re working with the CEO to synthesize all of that before they go into the November offsite planning. And they’re coming with a draft. And then what’s the most important thing in my mind for this type of session is going, hey, we’ve got the top down guidance. We’ve got our bottoms up plan. Where are the where do we see the potential issues? Like for example, the sales team needs 50 new salespeople. However, we don’t have the money for that right in the budget. So like let’s talk about that while we’re all together and being able to identify.

Julian Castelli 00:21:17 As part of the role, prioritizing where the discussion has to be like identifying circle those conflicts and then saying, okay, which of the ones we want to spend our time trying to problem solve?

Keziah 00:21:25 Yeah.

Keziah 00:21:25 And partnering with the CEO to go. What better time than all of us to be in a room to have those conversations. I don’t want a bunch of. I don’t want to fly a bunch of people in. Spend lots of money and just have, like, a status update. Go to your friends like a power. We don’t need that. We need it to be talking about the really hard conversations of the business going.

Julian Castelli 00:21:42 And you can’t do that unless you’ve done a lot of homework, right?

Keziah 00:21:45 Right. And if you want to bring them all and have a good, thoughtful meeting, you have got to be doing the homework. You got to do the four things leading up to it to be successful. And that’s where the chief of staff runs that process. And then I know you asked me about communication, but then that all leads to the stakeholders. Who are the stakeholders, what do they care about in the annual planning and then creating messaging as you go into January, right, to communicate that out.

Keziah 00:22:07 And that can look very simple. And it can also be very complicated, right? We’ve done it for varying different clients, and we have some clients that create videos. It gets internal marketing. How excited were we about this annual planning? I mean, the communication I think is very, very key. But you can also do it in very simple ways, but also very complex, complex ways. And that just depends on the nature of your business, but it’s really important once you.

Julian Castelli 00:22:30 Get to know. I thank you for something to summarize that. And actually we have some graphics that you shared that we’ll publish in the, in, you know, put on our website so people can come grab some of that. And maybe Gord, you can share some of your, your frameworks as well so that we can, we can, share that with the audience because that really is great to see that that step that you just outlined and it’s, it’s it’s totally logical. So Gord, over to you.

Julian Castelli 00:22:53 Now we’ve got a we’ve got a strategic plan, you know, how do you recommend that it’s communicated to get alignment, not just with the leadership team in the in the meeting, but with the rest of the whole organization?

Gord Boyce 00:23:01 Yeah, it’s the second tool that we talk about in a US methodology called Shared by All. And that is once we’ve completed the Vision Building one and Vision Building two days, we’ve got your auto complete today, answers to those questions. The next thing that we ask our visionary or integrator to do, whoever is the likely person to do that, get up in front of the entire company and share it and answer any questions that the the team has. But it’s critical that your entire company understands what that vision is, and then it’s. We add on to that by making sure that every single employee in your company has a rock or a 90 day business objective that’s in some way ties back to that vision, so that every day when you can come in, you understand what your your rocks are, your goals for the next 90 days and how they will assist in helping the company meet that vision.

Gord Boyce 00:23:53 Once you’ve achieved once you’ve achieved that, you’ll have buy in from everyone in your company. Sure, they see their part in achieving this success.

Julian Castelli 00:23:59 Yeah, you have to have that. It has to be consistent. People have to feel like they’re contributing to the the overall strategy of the company. Yeah. So you might have an all company meeting. How do you instruct the the leadership team to share with their teams? Because what’s the best and best practices you’ve seen? You have an annual meeting, but that’s often not enough. How do you reinforce it?

Keziah 00:24:16 I’m going to go back to like your key stakeholder groups, which is usually the board. It’s the executive team, it’s management. And then it’s all hands. All companies have a version of those for Right? And so then it’s about crafting the message and the vehicle by which you’re going to communicate that to the board likely has been involved. The executive team has been involved. The management may have been involved in sort of whether it’s been creating rocks or the bottoms up plan.

Keziah 00:24:38 They need to be enabled with what the vision is. And then then again, the all hands. I think it’s something to your point, Gord. Get out there, share the share the message, but keep it I don’t there’s a level of kind of everyone doesn’t need to know the same level of detail about the annual plan. Right. And so I think there’s two parts of it. Don’t assume everyone understands. If you have a team, you’re a hundred people.

Julian Castelli 00:25:00 Different departments have different type of ears, don’t they?

Keziah 00:25:02 Totally. And so make sure that the that the managers in the executive team understand it in more detail so they can answer any questions. But then I think it’s you certainly have to then communicate it out to the wider all company. And I would always keep it engaging, keep it growth. I mean all of that. It’s very I think it’s an opportunity as a leader to get people excited about the new year. And I would use it that way.

Julian Castelli 00:25:25 Let me ask you a question.

Julian Castelli 00:25:26 Because. Because what comes to my mind is the telephone game, right? We could all agree. You know, we could play the telephone game. We could have a sentence that we all. That’s the sentence. And then you just pass it along the ears. And by the fifth fifth ear, it’s completely different, right? To me, that feels like an area where a chief of staff, like the CEO can’t follow that and make sure that the the message doesn’t get mutated over by the, by the, by the 10th communication. But maybe that’s a role for a chief of staff. Is that is that something you see where they come in really handy to make sure there’s consistent communication? And how do they do that.

Keziah 00:25:55 The chief of staff creates? I mean, they create a plan, right, of communication. And who’s going to do it and when are you going to do it? And Gord, have you done it? And if you told your team, you know, make it PM ING that process to make sure that everyone has communicated to the people.

Julian Castelli 00:26:08 So they’re in charge of the rollout process, they can ensure that it happens, but they also ensure consistency. And they come back up and say, hey, you know what? Our engineers had a at a problem with, you know, rock for and do they bring things back up to the top. What’s what’s the feedback loop?

Keziah 00:26:23 Not at that point. I want to know that in September or October. Right. There’s always going to.

Julian Castelli 00:26:28 Be no given, given how late people start. Based on we talked about. That’s why you want to start early right.

Keziah 00:26:34 Or earlier. But then there’s also some some elements of this. That’s why keep it to the level of appropriateness, right. That they they care about. If you go out to a bunch of engineers start talking about EBITDA, they’re going to be like, I don’t care about that. How are we going to ship this product? Right? So I guess it’s a level of appropriateness, but that is why you need someone to kind of PM that process to make sure that the right messaging goes at the right time.

Keziah 00:26:55 Listen, I’ve rolled out annual processes for billion dollar businesses in times of crisis, right? We were writing out exactly what people could say in these. I mean, so there’s you can really hyper manage this or you just need someone to make sure it’s happening. Right. There’s a lot of, there’s different ways you can do it.

Julian Castelli 00:27:11 But yeah, well, I think I think just making sure that the meetings happen is a huge thing. Number one, I think making sure there’s consistency of Communication. And then I think that, you know. you know, God forbid. Maybe you know that nothing’s not smooth, right? You need a backchannel. Right? So I think those are all three areas where I’ve seen chief of staff been really good, because otherwise it’s like, okay, we just assume someone will pick up that that gap when it happens, right? And to me, that’s the, you know, the have you ever heard the word gap filler as being used for describe chief of staff? Because that’s the way I think of it, right? Like I say, I’m so grateful to have this person because these are the things that, you know, I stay up awake at night as a CEO thinking, oh my God, that’s going to fall through the gaps.

Julian Castelli 00:27:50 Like, you know, that was in between marketing and sales. Who really owns it, right.

Keziah 00:27:53 Yeah.

Julian Castelli 00:27:54 Yep. All right. Well let’s go on. Okay. So we’ve we’ve we’ve we’ve we’ve done the planning process. Ideally we’ve built a strategic plan. We’ve communicated it. Now the next step is execution. And I think you know, Gord, you have some very specific, frameworks for execution and reporting. And Keziah, you also shared kind of like the quarterly reporting. Let’s start with you, Gord. Talk. You know, what are what is your framework and recommendations for how to ensure execution is happening.

Gord Boyce 00:28:20 Sure. So we we follow a very specific process for how we focus today and envision building one and envisioning building day two. So that’s when you’ve got the basic tactical things handled and your strategy kind of work out. Then you move into execution mode, which is once every 90 days or once a quarter you get together with. If you’ve got a professional implementer like myself, I get together with my teams and we simply we spend a day taking a look back, okay, here’s where you said you were going to be, or here’s where you were 90 days ago and what you said you were going to do over the next 90 days.

Gord Boyce 00:28:52 Fast forward to today. How did that go? Okay. Let’s talk about the successes. Let’s talk about the missteps and how do we correct the missteps and.

Julian Castelli 00:29:00 How much prep work. Who does the prep work for that? This is where I wonder. I’m getting my the hair on my back of my neck is standing up because I’m like, okay, you can maybe get everyone in the same room, but what you just required, you know, as a CFO multiple times, I might have the quarterly financial review done because that’s just part of my rhythm of business. But, you know, if I’m thinking about all the rocks are going to be cross-functional across other divisions, who makes sure everyone’s got that that 90 day a scorecard built? Is that a good chief of staff role or is that that who does that in iOS.

Gord Boyce 00:29:29 So I would say that would be the integrator, I think, because I would say that would be the chief of staff on their one.

Julian Castelli 00:29:33 Okay. Well that’s.

Gord Boyce 00:29:34 A good.

Julian Castelli 00:29:34 Example is a similar role right.

Gord Boyce 00:29:36 Yeah. It’s a it’s an exact same exact same role. You’re right. There’s a there’s a lot of things to bring to that meeting, but it should not be overwhelming. My my teams are not spending days getting prepared for this quarterly meeting. And in fact, that’s the beauty of iOS is iOS gives you enough information. If you’re sitting down to have a nice meal, it’ll give you enough food so that you’re satisfied. We’re not going to stop you. We’re going to give you enough to get you full and then get out of your way.

Julian Castelli 00:30:01 It’s it’s a snack able exercise. You can, you can, you can prepare. And then and then the real values when you’re together making decisions.

Gord Boyce 00:30:07 Right. So we get together, we look at what if you’ve got a management team of say 6 or 7 people, that’s about 40 rocks just. And we don’t talk to them to death unless they need to be. If Iraq has been met, then all we need to hear about it is that it’s been met.

Gord Boyce 00:30:21 If it hasn’t, then we say something called drop it down and that’s when we’ll talk about something. Anyway, here we are now with the current state. Now let’s work on what are we going to do. What are the most significant, important priorities for the next 90 days? And let’s set up a new set of rocks for the management team, for the company. And so that the leaders of the of the company can then set up rocks with everyone else in their company.

Julian Castelli 00:30:43 And so you’ve got 90 day rocks, which you’ve described as the quarterly goals, and you’ve chosen a handful for the first quarter. So you want to understand if you’ve got it done. Have you kind of created a, you know, a list. So you have, you know, four quarters worth of rocks so you can pick up new ones each each quarter or some of them inevitably get carried on, I’m sure, and say, oh, this is done. So it goes like. So if you have like eight rocks, you know how many typically get pushed to the next quarter, then how many, you know, usually are you picking from the, the, the the bin of the, the next most ripe rocks.

Gord Boyce 00:31:14 So yeah, I mean, every company is different, but I would say it’s probably roughly half and half.

Julian Castelli 00:31:18 Okay.

Gord Boyce 00:31:19 Rock’s carrying over. We have the same rock every quarter. We’re really concerned about revenue or customer meaning whatever, whatever the metric is. We’re very concerned with that. And that carries over and maybe changes from quarter to quarter. Maybe you want that metric going up or maybe you want it going down. I think you can carry them over, but you’re setting up your rocks for the next 90 days.

Julian Castelli 00:31:38 So you’re going to get alignment on what’s most important in the next 90 days.

Gord Boyce 00:31:41 Right. So we’re just in those 90 day sessions. We’re just talking about those 90 days, the next 90 days and the past 90 days. In your annual sessions, which are typically two days. That’s when we make the update to the strategic plan.

Julian Castelli 00:31:53 Yeah, yeah, I understand, which includes.

Gord Boyce 00:31:55 The three year.

Julian Castelli 00:31:56 Talk to us about from your angle, chief of staff, what’s in their playbook in terms of quarterly quarterly planning or quarterly update updates? You know, again, obviously the CFO is going to do their financial view for the board.

Julian Castelli 00:32:07 But what’s the role of the chief of staff at a quarterly basis?

Keziah 00:32:10 Well, if I think about as we, as we as the chief of staff is running the process as you go into the new year to move to execution. There’s three sort of deliverables that they own, right? It’s the milestone plan. Let’s use rocks in the US. So it’s what’s that initial rock plan and then the talent plan and the budget. Okay, so there’s the budget with the CFO. There’s the talent plan with the head of HR. And then there’s this milestone plan that it’s either the integrator that to the staff that’s that’s helping to kind of make sure that that is going to plan. So those are the three outputs. And then we call it the rhythm of business. Right. So the staff is running similar to what Gord says outside of that quarterly planning. They’re creating a rhythm which is like it’s quarterly, monthly, daily, weekly, whatever. You’re sort of the cadence of your businesses that we then execute against it.

Keziah 00:32:55 So the chief of staff is running accountability against those. Let’s call them 3 to 5 rocks that we decided on at the beginning. Are we hitting them? What’s going on? And I think the main value that the chief of staff brings is the issue and risk management at that executive team level. Right. We see that we’re not going to hit this rock. Why? What’s going on? What do you need? Help. If I’m working my CEO, I go, hey, these rocks are red. Let’s focus there. What are we going to do? We think we’re going to.

Julian Castelli 00:33:20 Is that is that in a dashboard? Is the chief of staff pulling together a dashboard and making those flash red? And is that part of their inner inner core activity so that they that they’re, they’re going to make sure that they’ve got that dashboard ready at the quarter to show what’s, what’s flashing.

Keziah 00:33:34 Yeah. So it’s a we do it weekly right. So there’s a weekly dashboard on progression of rocks. In fact we actually use slack I know I know iOS has a ton of really great tools like 90 and things like that.

Keziah 00:33:44 Really sophisticated tools. We actually we’ve used slack on tracking rocks. So there’s this like nice. Right. But I think there’s also an element of whatever you use. Right. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just saying, okay, where are we? How are we progressing against what we said we were going to do this quarter and setting in both meetings and communication mechanisms to make sure that they’re we’re talking about the right things at the right time. Gawd, I don’t know. A lot of our clients that run on us always talk about the L10 meeting being the most powerful, thing that they come out of iOS with. I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about that.

Julian Castelli 00:34:20 Well, she’s the ultimate ten meeting board.

Gord Boyce 00:34:22 It’s just our prescription for how you should have your weekly meeting every week. You should have what we call a level ten meeting, which includes your leadership team. And there’s a very specific agenda that you follow. But it should happen at the same time, on the same day every week.

Gord Boyce 00:34:37 And the only reason to miss it is death. Or, you know, sickness is a very serious thing that happens every week and you follow the same agenda, which is a very quick check in, followed by just an update on all of our metrics. So this is what our scorecard is looking like this week. This is what our rocks are looking like this week. These are the customer or employee headlines. So Joe over here just quit. What are we going to do about that. And and this is the our to do list from last week. That all takes about 15 minutes. But really all you’re talking about there is what’s off track, and everything that’s off track is going to be talked about for the majority of the meeting. It just sets a cadence and automatically your priorities bubble to the top. So all the important things get discussed first every week.

Julian Castelli 00:35:23 I love it. Well, I’d love to, you know, let’s let’s share an outline of that with our listeners. And we’ll put that in the note in the episode notes.

Julian Castelli 00:35:30 That’s the great, great.

Gord Boyce 00:35:32 It’s one of the most powerful parts of iOS, just that cadence.

Keziah 00:35:36 And Julien, one other thing I’ll add about the execution. What I like Chiefs of Staff to do is actually map out the full year because again earlier, we always know the holidays are in December, right? We know when two planning is going.

Julian Castelli 00:35:47 Oh man, I got surprised. It’s Thanksgiving.

Keziah 00:35:50 We know that in May people’s kids in school. So we like there’s just lots of things we already know for the year. We know that our big customer meeting is this day. So have your chief of staff map out the full year layer in your your weeklies, your monthlies, your board meetings. Right. So we usually use this concentric circle of, you know, when your board meetings are usually for the full year. Layer that all into one master plan for the year and you will be surprised at the. What you already know is going to happen that year. And then you go into, okay, now realistically, what do we think our rock should be? And I love that view.

Keziah 00:36:21 And I and most companies that get a little nervous if you say to wrap up a full year, but you know most of it. I’m not saying map your rocks out for Q4 in January. You you know, it’s the holidays. You know, we’re going to have to do Q4 planning all of that. And then what you can do is actually back up from if we know quarterly plan is coming, we know we’re going to have to get the budget from the CFO to re forecast for the next quarter, right. All of that stuff needs to be run and owned by someone, right?

Julian Castelli 00:36:47 The cross-functional element. Yeah, 100%. So let’s let’s shift on to kind of some of the challenges that are that, that today’s work environment presents. Right? I think we are overstimulated and over bombarded with more channels of communication and, and media and all sorts of things. Right? Our work teams are not together, so they’re not getting that serendipitous watercooler conversations. What are some of the challenges of strategic strategic, strategic planning in 2026 and beyond that, maybe we’re easier.

Julian Castelli 00:37:15 Five years ago, when we were all in the office together.

Gord Boyce 00:37:17 And what are easier?

Julian Castelli 00:37:19 No, they’re they’re harder today. What are the what are the things that make it harder today? It was easier five, ten years ago when we were all in the same office.

Gord Boyce 00:37:25 Sure. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, I would say that the fact that we’re not all together is the biggest thing, obviously. And what I find when people are doing remote meetings, meetings that are in person are much more effective. It’s not critical that they everything be in person. But as much as possible, if you can be in person, that would be better as what we find with with iOS anyway. And I think that even if you can’t get people together, put a stake in the ground, do your strategic strategic planning anyway. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there. The political environment is uncertain. The economy is uncertain. There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, and there always has been. But the companies that are successful are the ones that put a stake in the ground, come up with a strategy and shift their strategy as needed as market conditions change.

Julian Castelli 00:38:06 And having that strategy does provide some some consistency and alignment internally that counterbalance that uncertainty. Maybe that’s in the macroeconomic environment. So I think that’s a good, good thought because any thoughts on this? What makes it harder today and how to counterbalance all the noise.

Keziah 00:38:22 I mean, I think being in person for that initial annual, like everything you just said is critical. And I think developing the right. I mean, I come from a change management background at Accenture, so I’m always all about how do we get people to be bought into what we’re going to then roll out? Right, right. I don’t get them. I think a challenge that I’ve seen in remote is that the buy in that we want at the manager level, and the people who are doing the really hard work, like how do we get them into it if we’re not flying them all to an event to off site? Yeah. And so being creative about how do we actually pull them into it so they feel ownership, they understand do they have a rock.

Keziah 00:38:58 Do they understand what rocks even are. And so just giving that level of communication and thinking about it with your change management hat on. That’s just something I see more challenging and remote. But a lot of our. Yeah, you’re moving back in person, so.

Julian Castelli 00:39:10 Well, that’s happening. And as you both know, that’s one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at Growth Elevated is it gives the teams a chance to come together in a pre curated environment and a place it’s easy to fly in and out of and say, hey, use this as part of your planning, come early, stay late, whatever. And I think that that’s, that’s one of the one of the pillars that we’re building around, because it’s so hard for these remote teams to have that catalyst to get together and do some critical planning or quarterly meeting, whatever it might be. And so but we’ve seen that loud and clear within the community. All right. So let let last, you know, closing closing advice for, you know, entrepreneurs and CEOs out there who maybe have the, the, the, the burden of a big rock of strategic planning on their, on their shoulders.

Julian Castelli 00:39:53 And maybe they’re a little intimidated. They haven’t been doing it perfectly in the past. What would advice do you have have for them? I’ll start with you because I.

Keziah 00:39:58 Think, I mean, you’ll share the six steps. I, I don’t think it has to be that complicated. I think it’s if you haven’t done it before, just set a plan and it’s going to change. Make the assumption that it will change, right? So don’t forget, don’t delay. The planning is one thing that we see that I would I would say start in September. Don’t delay it to December. Don’t ignore market conditions kind of like you talked about. And then don’t forget to actually re forecast it quarterly. It also gives you more flexibility if you’re not like I’m marrying this full one year.

Julian Castelli 00:40:26 Just that’s a great point. Yeah.

Keziah 00:40:28 Forecast and then do it. In that sense it depends on how mature you are in the planning process. But I’ve seen that be really effective if you’re new to the process.

Julian Castelli 00:40:35 I like that that’s a lot less intimidating.

Julian Castelli 00:40:37 The quarterly view.

Gord Boyce 00:40:38 Gawd, I totally agree with everything because I just said I think the most important thing no is in to typical iOS fashion is to keep it simple. Like everything we do in the US is simple.

Julian Castelli 00:40:48 Yeah, that’s one of the real strengths, right?

Gord Boyce 00:40:51 Yeah, I think it’s one of the things that are so well, again, about iOS is just simplicity. And starting tomorrow or today, if you can. It doesn’t matter what’s going on if you start this planning today and pick a system, it doesn’t have to be iOS anything out there. If you follow some form of a system that you like, just do it. Stick to the plan and you will find that over time it will reap benefits.

Julian Castelli 00:41:11 Well, fantastic start today. Yeah, we start today. The falls. The leaves are about to start turning. We’ve seen some some orange leaves here in the mountains where I live. And it’s time to start. So if you’re listening to this and you haven’t started yet, that is the clear advice.

Julian Castelli 00:41:24 Let’s get started. And if you need some help, gourd, where do people find you and your iOS frameworks? Okay, terrific. And because if someone is chief of staff curious and wants to wants to get some help on this, or maybe it’s part of their strategic plan is to get a chief of staff or train an internal resource for a chief of staff. Where can they get some help from from your your business.

Keziah 00:41:46 So we’re van and chief of staff Comm and they can reach out via the the home page. And we also see lots of CEOs using interim chiefs of staff, which we have on our team that can be accessed.

Julian Castelli 00:41:56 So you can kind of try it out a little.

Keziah 00:41:58 Bit and try it out and, you know, happy to always talk with chief of staff curious leaders.

Julian Castelli 00:42:04 And so, yeah, you can help help coach people as to what the chief of staff role is and how to how to, try it out before making that full investment. And who knows, that may be part of people’s strategic planning is to get a chief of staff or to maybe try the EOS system, both of which I think are our cheat codes for doing this well.

Julian Castelli 00:42:22 And that’s why I was so grateful to have you guys on the podcast this morning. Thanks for joining us, guys.

Keziah 00:42:26 Thanks, Julie.

Gord Boyce 00:42:26 Thanks for having me.

Julian Castelli 00:42:32 Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we’d be grateful if you recommend it to a friend. If you’d like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at growth com. We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.